John had been in a temper all day: clattering about the house, scowling and silent.

Mary stood with her belly pressed up tight against the sink as she washed up the dinner dishes, watching him from underneath her eyelashes. He’d obviously slept poorly last night. Dreams, most likely, not that he ever told her anything, and he was always tense afterwards. His shoulder had obviously been hurting when he got up, and then after a full day at the surgery, had stiffened up completely.

She’d been biting her tongue against the suggestion that an Ibuprofen might do more good than another whiskey.

It wouldn’t have gone down well.

There was no question of a companionable evening in the living room. By mutual, silent assent, it would be an early night.

They got ready for bed in silence, John downing the last of his glass before brushing his teeth.

Mary waited until he’d stripped to his boxer shorts before making her move.

“Can I give you a massage?” she asked. “It might help you sleep.”

He scowled at her for a second, but after a moment arranged a couple of pillows and lay face down on top of them.

Carefully, Mary climbed onto the bed, propping one knee in at his waist and swinging the other over him, settling her bulk on top of his hips. She smoothed her hands over his back gently, feeling out the lines of tension in his upper back and neck.

“Harder?” she asked softly, and pressed either side of his spine in the middle of his back.

“Please,” said John.

She dug her fingers in properly then, attacking the source of tension, leaning as much of her body weight as she could onto her arms around the awkwardness of her belly.

“Is that too close?” she asked, after a minute. She was working her way carefully around the neat round scar on the back of his shoulder; if that was sore, there was little she could do about it. The tense muscles all around it, however, that overworked themselves to protect the injury, were fair game.

“Fine,” he said.

Safely behind John’s head, Mary rolled her eyes. Sometimes John was very hard work.

But the muscles were starting to unknot, and his spine cracked as it began to move more easily under the pressure. Perhaps tomorrow would be a better day.

“I could try working on it a little every night,” she offered. “If it helps to stop it from stiffening again overnight.”

“Yeah, well,” John said bitterly. “You’d know all about being on this end of the shot.”

Mary sighed silently, letting her fingers relax a little, working gently at the suddenly diamond-hard muscles again without expecting them soften. So that had been what he’d dreamt about last night; what had had him working his temper up into a lather all day.

Not that she really expected it could have been anything else. She’d known this wouldn’t work. Known, the moment John knew anything about her history, he’d get like this.

And, of course, he’d found out at the worst possible time, when she’d done the unforgivable. Shooting Sherlock—Sherlock, who seemed to consider the whole thing a non-issue—who followed Mary's decision-making process all the way to protect John and considered his own near-death an acceptable risk—who thought that it would be something that John and Mary could maybe work past?

For a smart man, he really could be very stupid. They were grasping at threads, each holding for dear life onto the fiction that had once sustained them, even though they all knew the lies for what they were.

“Sorry,” said John sullenly, muscles still rigid under her hands. Then he succeeded in moderating his tone further. “I… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m supposed trying.”

“It’s okay,” said Mary, because it had to be. Tentatively, she worked her fingers in between the shoulder-blades. “We both knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”

Or possible, she didn’t say.

John wisely didn’t respond to that, lying quiescent and forcibly relaxed between Mary’s knees, his chest expanding and contracting in an even rhythm.

“But I do, actually,” said Mary eventually, making a decision. If this wasn’t working, she would have to try something new.

She pinched the ropey centres on either side of his neck and felt them pulse as John took a moment to decode her statement, tensed again and then deliberately, slowly, relaxed.

“You do…” he prompted carefully.

“Know about it,” said Mary. “Being shot.”

“Hmmm,” said John, and this time he didn’t tense.

Mary sat in silence for a while, working her way down the top of John’s spine. Her thumbs ached with the effort of pressure of stretching out the muscles, .

“It was in Libya,” she decided in the end. “I was gathering information, that was all—but there was a guard and…”

And that would have to be enough, wouldn’t it? She could give John the details he loved of moonlit chases and clever escapes, but it would only be another lie. Crouching in the bushes and clutching a makeshift tourniquet as she tried not to bleed out there and then… That wasn’t a story for the blog, just a stupid mistake, and not even hers. Damned bureaucrats.

There was a reason she’d left the official government chain of command and become a contractor.

“Bullet shattered the fibula,” she said in the end, falling back on their usual dry lines of communication at the surgery.  “Had to be surgically pinned.”

And hadn’t that been a bit of luck, that it wasn’t a weight-bearing bone. If she hadn’t been able to limp her way out while the search was focused elsewhere, she would have died when she lost the cover of night.

“Took a bit of rehab to get me back in the field,” she said, “but I was young and keen, and I made it.”

Made it, despite the fact that they wouldn’t take her back. That was the other reason she’d left government service.

John was silent for a moment and then said, his voice half muffled against the pillow, “Scars?”

Mary wrinkled her nose, she should have guessed that would be his question. How she’d hidden it. But at least asking the question was progress.

“Lasered,” she said calmly. “They’re pretty faint; I’m not surprised you didn’t notice them. I’ll show you later if you want a look.”

“Mmmm,” he said again. “No, s’fine. I… trust you.”

She stifled the small huff of laughter before it could escape, thinking of the memory key burning in the fireplace, the grand gesture on both their parts. A leap of faith was a long way from trust.

“I hope you can again,” she prevaricated. She gave his shoulder one last pat before planting her hands and swinging her leg back off him and stand beside the bed.

“Mary…” John caught her hand to forestall her retreat, rolling onto his side to look up at her, smiling a faint, forced smile.

He couldn’t seem to find the words he wanted, though.

“Thank you for the massage,” he said in the end, and turned his head back and forth carefully on the pillow, rolling the shoulder as he did to check mobility. “It’s heaps better. I’m sorry I’ve been a grump today.”

Mary smiled back, only a little more brightly than she felt. “I’m glad I could help,” she said, and she let him pull her back down onto the bed, into the space beside him.

They lay together: Mary curled on her side around the bulk of her belly, John wedged up behind her, still a little stiff and uncomfortable, but holding her closer than he had for months.

Trust.

It was a fragile thing at the best of times, and theirs had been stretched well past the breaking point. Mary could only hope it could be rebuilt from the fragile threads that remained, tentatively extended and painstakingly knitted together to re-form their relationship on an entirely new basis.

And if Mary half woke in the middle of the night to the feeling of empty space at her back and cold air on her exposed calf, well, she was a good enough agent to feign sleep through the barely-there examination of a long-healed wound.

She trusted John: trusted that he was trying to trust her in return. She had to trust that if they both kept trying, they would get back the easy peace they’d once had before he’d known anything at all. The fact that they could still try, at this point, was more than she’d ever hoped for when she’d pulled the trigger.

She lay quietly until John returned the covers and slid back in behind her. He lay propped up on his elbow there for a minute, just looking at her, before lying down and slinging an arm over her.

“Love you,” she offered sleepily, shifting back flush against him.

“Mmmm,” he returned, pressing a kiss to the back of her neck, his arm tightening around her stomach. “Yeah, me too.”

Beneath his palm, their daughter kicked.